The New Sitcom ‘Clean Slate’ Tells A Trans Story Right When It’s Needed the Most

If you follow the human interest verticals of your news sources, you spent last year reading about children choosing to go “no contact” with their parents. Some TV creators must have had familial estrangement on their minds well before that, because 2025 has kicked off with this story being foundational to multiple new sitcoms. In Going Dutch, a father is thrown back into the life of the daughter who went no contact with him three years ago; they’re both in the military, and the father’s commanding officer knows about their tense relationship and is intentionally messing with him. In Shifting Gears, a daughter descends on her father after their contact with each other tapered off upon the death of her mother; the daughter’s marriage is falling apart, and she and her children need somewhere to live. Now, in Clean Slate, a father receives an email from the person he’s always thought of as his son, but sometime in the two decades they have had no contact, she’s affirmed her gender identity as a woman; she’s made some poor financial decisions and has nowhere else to go. It may not be the funniest of this season’s many shows about fathers and daughters reconnecting, but Clean Slate definitely feels the most urgent.

When Desiree Slate (Laverne Cox) was known as Desmond, she grew up in Mobile, Alabama. She endured bullying for being different, and didn’t feel safe to reveal her whole truth to her widowed father Harry (George Wallace), so she fled to New York City at the age of 17 and ended contact with Harry. Twenty-three years later, Desiree has trusted the wrong man, lost everything in her attempt to finance her own art gallery based on his false promises, and gets on a bus back to Mobile; via email, she tells her dad she’s coming, but nothing else. Harry sets up the living room to enjoy a Bama football game with the son he’s expecting. When he rushes to the door with a jersey, he has no idea who the beautiful woman waiting there might be. Desiree explains that she’s Harry’s daughter, and always has been. As they catch up inside, Harry is justifiably confused about the change in his child, but readily tells her she should stay in her old room and not with her old friend, church choir director Louis (D.K. Uzoukwu) — when she comes back from seeing Louis, Harry will make wings! Desiree then has to come out again, this time as a vegetarian, which Harry seems to take harder than her transition. 

Over the course of the pilot, we meet all the key characters: Mack (Jay Wilkison), a formerly incarcerated single father who works at Harry’s car wash; Opal (Norah Murphy), his tween daughter; Miguel (Phillip Garcia), the next-door neighbor Harry feuds with over property lines; and Louis’ mother Miss Ella (Telma Hopkins), with whom Louis still lives, and who knows Louis is gay but is patiently waiting for him to tell her. Through the eight-episode season, Desiree strengthens her ties to the community she came from, and Harry learns to relate to his child now that her physical presentation matches her true self. Requiring Harry to pay a $5 penalty to the Pronoun Jar every time he messes up helps.

Clean Slate — which premieres Thursday on Prime Video — was co-created by Cox, Wallace and first time series creator Dan Ewen. They might have been able to get it a pickup on their own, but it surely helped that one of its executive producers is Norman Lear, the late and legendary sitcom producer and liberal activist. (Clean Slate was greenlit in 2022, not long before his death.) In more recent years, Lear’s work, particularly Good Times, has been reconsidered in terms of which personnel on his productions were treated as respected collaborators and which Lear may have used his power to silence. At least in his last two live-action series — the mid-aughts remake of One Day At A Time, and Clean Slate — stories about queer characters and/or characters of color were steered behind the scenes by artists from those communities. (Last year’s animated Good Times sequel is also one of Lear’s credits, but I’ve already said as much about it as I plan to in this life.)

This century’s One Day At A Time featured queer characters among its series regulars, but Desiree is the first major trans character in a Lear show, and one of a tiny handful of sitcom characters who are (a) played by trans actors and (b) have more to do than shockingly reveal their gender identity — we’re glaring at you, Krista Allen in Married…With Children and Jenny McCarthy in Just Shoot Me!. Desiree is also the first of this year’s estranged sitcom daughters whose show centers her as a survivor of her father’s inadequate parenting. By contrast, Dutch and Gears are both mostly about fathers being taught — generally under duress — that they could be doing a better job, and that they must consciously change in order to be worthy of being in their daughters’ lives. 

Clean Slate was originally developed for Freevee, Prime Video’s ad-supported, subscription-free, now-shuttered offshoot, which is probably why it feels so insistently upbeat, sometimes in contradiction to its own premise. For example: Harry has basically accepted Desiree’s gender identity by the end of their first conversation. If Harry is this warm and understanding, why did Desiree cut him out of her life? If his reaction is surprising to her based on her experience of their relationship, why doesn’t she comment on it?

Or: Desiree returns to her childhood church, where Pastor Hughes (Keith Arthur Bolden) hurts her feelings by shaking her hand on the way out, the way he does male parishioners, instead of hugging her and kissing her cheek like he does all the women. Miss Ella and her late mother’s other friends are scandalized and organize a boycott. If nearly everyone at a Southern Baptist church is this open-minded, why did Desiree feel she had no place in the neighborhood? And why hasn’t Louis come out as gay? If this represents an evolution of the congregation’s attitudes, why don’t we hear what educated them?  

Probably the most topical episode is the fifth, “Pillars.” It’s set on Election Day, and everyone is excited to vote, though not for any particular party or policy we hear about. Mack reminds us that, as a convicted felon, he’s not entitled to vote, but the scene quickly moves on. Harry makes a reference to January 6th when he runs into Miguel in line, but Miguel just says he’s a Libertarian and that discussion is neutered too. Misinformation that directs a whole neighborhood’s worth of voters to a closed polling place is presented as a logistical problem for electoral inspector Miss Ella to accommodate and not a possibly illegal instance of election interference. A crooked white cop pulls Louis over as he’s driving the Dialysis Divas to the polls, threatening to arrest Louis on suspicion that the church van he borrowed is stolen. Louis and the lead Diva agree that they’re ready to march for their rights, but then just show up unencumbered at the polling place — how they shook the cop is something we never find out — where a (white) right-wing agitator wearing an American flag as a cape joins the general applause as these Black women walk in. It makes for a comforting image of democracy in action and citizens respecting one another’s dignity; it’s just not one I can imagine playing out in the recent past or near future. 

Any single one of these issues could have been the focus of a whole episode of the new One Day At A Time. Here, it feels like the episode is just a bucket for them to be brought up so producers can say they did, then dropped as swiftly as possible to avoid actual controversy.

But: there are jokes! When Desiree is catching Louis up on her current situation, he smirks at her for being “bus broke.” When it seems like Mack and Miguel are cooking up an illicit deal, it turns out they’re just hiding their friendship — including a Dungeons & Dragons party — from Harry and his inevitable disapproval. At Career Day, Opal gives Desiree a huge introduction as a New York City gallerist; her classmates aren’t impressed until she says that’s where Taylor Swift buys her sunglasses. A trip to a small-time theme park reveals that one midway game prize is a Facts of Life throw pillow that’s been around since Desiree was a kid; Harry remembers that Desiree loved the show but is under the misapprehension that her favorite character was “Sneezy,” not Tootie. 

Okay, that one’s not great, but Wallace puts it over. 

As for Cox, most of her best comic moments come in the season’s penultimate episode, “Mess and Magic.” When Desiree and Louis attend a queer ball during Mardi Gras, Desiree drinks too much and gets herself into low-stakes trouble. This is a woman made for running down a street in a gold catsuit while her brand-new friends Taylor (Jojo Brown), Natasha (Eva Reign) and White Natasha (Nicole Maines) accidentally steal her father’s car. Desiree has a major emotional moment in nearly every episode, and while Cox has learned the skill of crying a single, beautiful tear, she seems less comfortable in the moments when Desiree’s bravely maintaining her composure or revealing her vulnerability than when she’s being either supremely confident or silly.

It would have been nice if the jokes could have been as important as presenting a (possibly fantastical) portrait of radical acceptance for one extremely fabulous trans woman. But since this show is arriving just as Donald Trump’s presidential administration is directly attacking trans and nonbinary people and ending federal support for transgender healthcare for minors, it feels less important that Desiree’s story be hilarious than that it exists at all. It might be the last one we get for a while.